Thread: Traditional Immigration

http://www.numbersusa.com/overpopulation/immtrad.html


What IS our traditional immigration? Well, nobody can say there is just one definition. Because immigration has always had wide swings, there is no level that predominated throughout our history. But by running averages over various periods, we can get a sense of traditional averages in which there were long enough and deep enough lulls to handle previous peaks, etc.

Here are some options for looking at our traditions:

OUR NATIONAL TRADITION
UNTIL THE 1965 ACT RADICALLY CHANGED THE RULES

1776-1965: 230,000 per year average

We became a nation with the Declaration of Independence in 1776, so that makes a legitimate starting point. And because the 1965 Act so radically changed the numbers, it is fair to talk about what went before as being our traditions -- especially since the promoters of the Act promised that it would not raise immigration numbers.


OUR FIRST 200 YEARS TRADITION

1776-1976: 250,000 per year average

This provides a nice rounded period to claim for our tradition from the founding of our nation to its bicentennial 200 years later. It encompasses the 1972 year in which American women adopted a replacement-level fertility rate that would on its own ensure that the country's population would stop growing and stabilize (if immigration were in balance).


OUR NEW NATION TRADITION

1776-1819: 6,500 per year average

This was the flow of immigrants when the new nation was trying to populate Eastern frontiers to push back the indigenous peoples.

These statistics come from the work of Prof. Vernon Briggs, labor economist and historian from Cornell University. He has done more than any scholar to estimate the level of immigration during the emerging nation period before records were kept. ALL OF THE IMMIGRATION TOTALS FROM 1820 THROUGH THE PRESENT ARE FROM FEDERAL IMMIGRATION RECORDS THAT WERE PROVIDED BY THE IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE (NOW THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY).


OUR CONTINENTAL EXPANSION TRADITION

1820-1879: 162,000 per year average

This marked the first period for which there are official government records. Immigration was used to try to settle all the frontiers of the now continental nation. It was this level of immigration that succeeded in sectioning off the land of virtually the entire country, driving the Indians into reservations, decimating the buffalo, plowing under the prairies. Just after this period after the 1890 Census, demographers declared that the population had grown and spread out so much that there no longer was any frontier in the U.S. Never in history had such a sustained numerical level of immigration filled one country.


OUR GREAT WAVE/INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION TRADITION

1880-1924: 584,000 per year average

Based on faster and safer transportation and a virtually insatiable appetite for cheap foreign labor to expand their industries, the Robber Barons of the Guilded Age more than tripled the level of immigration, using it to keep wages for all American workers low, to bust unions and to keep freed slaves from moving off the South's plantations to take jobs in the North. The industrialists ships were in perpetual motion bringing new workers from other lands. The net immigration during this period was considerably lower, though, than the nearly 600,000 average because scores of thousands of immigrants went back home every year, unable to handle the living and working conditions of America during that time.


OUR RISE-OF-THE-MIDDLE-CLASS, END-OF-MASS-IMMIGRATION TRADITION

1925-1965: 178,000 per year average

Based on the excesses of the Great Wave, Congress severely limited the numerical levels of immigration and declared finished the ages of using immigration to fill frontiers or to provide masses of unskilled labor to factories and farms. It was during these 40 years that most Americans -- aided by tighter labor markets -- moved into the middle class for the first time.


Origin of the 250,000 figure for traditional immigration

Approximately 250,000 per year always seems like it the most accurate way of describing our immigration tradition before the 1965 Act reopened Mass Immigration.

All of those very different numerical traditions shown above average out to an overall tradition before the 1965 Act (that our movement is sworn to overturn) of around a quarter-million immigrants a year.

It also is a level that is part of our very recent immigration tradition, at time when nearly all Americans told pollsters they felt good about immigration. As it turns out, 250,000 is almost exactly the average of the 1945-1970 quarter century that ran from the end of WWII to the beginning of population-stabilization-level fertility shortly after the passage of the 1965 Act.

Origin of the 300,000 figure for traditional immigration

It is unclear where the 300,000 figure that is often referenced as our traditional average came from. It may be based on our immigration tradition after we started keeping federal records (1820) and until the 1965 Act. The average for that 145-year period was about 295,000. That also coincidentally happens to be almost exactly the level of immigration in 1965 when Congress changed the law and inadvertently unleashed levels of immigration totally out of proportion to our immigration tradition to that point.

Our Mass Immigration Tradition since the inadvertent effects of the 1965 act have given us these two periods:

THE POST-1965 CHAIN MIGRATION WAVE

1966-1989: 507,000 per year average

The 1965 Act was not intended to raise immigration from the around 300,000 year level of 1965 because there were no new frontiers to populate or massive factories needing unskilled labor. Inadvertently, though, the Act led to an ever growing chain of family connections so that the average of the next quarter century was nearly as high as the Great Wave which had itself been so totally different from all the rest of U.S. immigration history.


THE NEW GUILDED AGE OF MASS IMMIGRATION

1990-2005: 1,000,000+ per year average

By 1990, major industries were addicted to cheap foreign labor that enabled them to keep wages down for all Americans. A growing class of conspicuously affluent Americans depended on a foreign servant class and ensured that immigration remained at DOUBLE the level of the Great Wave prompted by the Robber Barons a century earlier. Legal immigration crossed the million-a-year mark at the beginning of this period and averaged above a million ever since.


http://www.numbersusa.com/overpopulation/immtrad.html

Illegal Immigration


http://www.numbersusa.com/interests/illegalimm.html

Census 2000 results indicate that there between 8 and 11 million illegal aliens living in the United States in 2000. The Center for Immigration Studies has reported that Census Bureau stats show that 700,000 to 800,000 new illegal aliens were settling in the U.S. during the late 1990s and that around 1 million settled in the most recent year of record. Far more than that enter illegally each year, but there is a lot of back and forth. The 1 million represents illegals who truly settle in for at least a couple of years, and usually much, much longer.

Mass illegal immigration is NOT inevitable

No nation can ever totally stop illegal immigration.

But MASS illegal immigration is NOT inevitable -- certainly not at the level that produced the extraordinary population of illegal workers and their families over the last decade.

The United States has mass illegal immigration because successive Congresses and Presidents have decided they want it. In one action after another over the last decade, they have declined to approve measures known to be effective to slow the illegal flow, they have decided to end various kinds of enforcement that had been effective, and they have approved a series of rewards to those who violate immigration laws.

NumbersUSA provides the nation's only complete record of what each Member of Congress has done to encourage or limit illegal immigration. Check out their votes.

Undermining U.S. environmental, labor, health and safety protections

A presence of 8 million to 11 million illegal aliens in this country is a sign that this country is losing control of its borders and the ability to determine who is a member of this national community. And a country that has lost that ability increasingly loses its ability to determine the rules of its society -- environmental protections, labor protections, health protections, safety protections.

In fact, a country that cannot keep illegal immigration to a low level quickly ceases to be a real country, or a real community. Rather than being self-governed, such a country begins to have its destiny largely determined by citizens of other countries who manage to move in illegally.

The division in Congress

Nearly all Members of Congress believe that we should have a fairly vigorous Border Patrol to make it difficult for people to enter this country illegally.


But a large percentage of Congress -- a majority on certain measures -- also believe that virtually all illegal aliens who get past the guards at the border or who enter legally and overstay their visas should be allowed to remain in the United States forever. Since 1997, Congress and Presidents have several times decided to give various groups of those illegal aliens the right to U.S. citizenship as a reward for their resourcefulness in evading our Border Patrol and immigration laws.

Not surprisingly, news of these rewards has spread globally and enticed hundreds of thousands more to become resourceful illegal aliens.

In Congress, there now is a serious debate about whether the nation should even try to enforce its immigration laws. The debate is between "national-community Americans" -- those who continue to believe in the idea of a separate, self-governed nation -- and those who have a "post-American" vision. The post-American vision is for (1) America's workers to be "allowed" to compete directly with every worker in the world who makes the effort to move to this country and for (2) the quality of life of a local community to be determined by global forces rather than by democratic self-determination.

'Interior Enforcement' divides 'post-Americans' from 'national-community Americans'

One of the quickest ways to discover which philosophy is guiding a federal official is to learn his or her stance of re-establishing "interior enforcement" in this country. That is, do they support the Immigration and Naturalization Service using all the tools now available to them through law to detect, detain and deport illegal aliens who have crossed the border and moved into the interior of the country?

And do they show openness to new ideas and funding to help the INS further disrupt the illegal immigration industry?

NumbersUSA testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration about some of the steps that Congress and the INS can take to beef up interior enforcement and begin to turn the tide against mass illegal immigration. (Read testimony)

In closing, the testimony noted that the chairman of the Commission on Immigration Reform, the late Barbara Jordan, testified before this committee on Feb. 24, 1995. She said:

"Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: Those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave."

Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA.com, went on to testify:

"This committee's oversight task is an incredibly important and challenging one because the INS currently is making virtually no effort to ensure that those who should not be here are required to leave.

"And because of that lack of interior enforcement, our amplified efforts on the border to ensure that 'those who should be kept out, are kept out' are failing. Around the world, the word is out: if you can succeed in evading the U.S. Border Patrol on your way in, and if you do not commit an aggravated felony once you travel a few miles into this country, you have virtually no chance of ever being forced to leave. With that kind of incentive, would-be illegal aliens around the world will do almost anything--including risking dying in the desert--to outmaneuver our Border Patrol.

"The general spirit of lawlessness in which so many communities find themselves tends to create a cycle of behavior that only moves the communities further toward anarchy. A leader of one group of citizens lamented that quiet homeowners after repeated frustration with the INS turned to the streets in public demonstrations outside their general experience: 'Citizens are forced to the streets to protest their own government because of its constructive abandonment of its duties to its citizens. Citizens are arrested while illegal aliens go about their business freely and act contrary to the law, with impunity.'

"On the border, citizens have drawn national news coverage for taking up arms and taking the law into their own hands as they defend their property from an invasion of sometimes a hundred illegal immigrants a day. These developments presage darker impulses that could be stirred. The abandonment of the enforcement of the law by the INS fans the embers of vigilantism that seem never to be fully extinguished in the spirits of human beings seeking a society of order over disorder.

"If this committee does not find a way to help the INS re-institute credible interior enforcement, the amount of money provided in the INS budget is of no particular consequence--except for the amount of the taxpayers' dollars that are being wasted."

I have nothing against legal immigration. My great grandparents came over here from Norway but illegal aliens are not immigrants, they are criminals.

Exactly , we have a large number of legal immigrants coming into the country, so add the millions of illegals it is easy to see why Americans having so many problems in the job market not to mention all other areas. I have a lot of respect for those that go through the process which from what I understand is lengthy and costly.